In my humble opinion

One players opinion on why everyone is doing it wrong.

Author: Daelus

MMORPGs: What makes a memorable moment?

  When we talk about MMOs that we previously played, or still are playing, there are always a few moments that come to mind. Be it when you finally sacked that uppity, elitist guilds town, or when you only just scraped a victory against that dragon when all thought it was impossible, I'm sure every player has a list of events that they loved. But what is it that seperates these things from the more mundane, every day events?

  To make something memorable, first of all, the player has to care about the outcome. If you're in a duel to the death, if losing means next to nothing, then no one really stands to lose. When no one can really lose, who can call themselves a winner? If a player truely cares about the outcome, it creates an instant intensity to the event, and it focuses the persons attention more than all the pretty graphics and particles in the world can hope to.

  To be clear, I'm not an advocate of something like permadeath, or corpse looting. There are other ways to make some care about the outcome of something, be it PvP, PvE, or a crafting scenerio. But, even so, I'm sure if you talk to someone who played a game that used permadeath, corpse runs, and full corpse looting, I'm sure they'd have plenty of entertaining stories about all of the above.

  There are other ways to create a meaningful outcome in a game, and not all of them have to be negative. You could, for example, give the option for the first group to defeat that dragon to take a screenshot and upload it to that game's website to display their achievement for all to see, with a comment and the date when it happened.  Or perhaps you could create personal player flags in a players profile based on how the perform in PvP combat that were publicly viewable. If losing or running from a fight labeled me as a weakling or a coward, I might try just that little bit harder.

  These are of course merely examples, there are multitudes of ways to do this, and many games have been using them for quite a while, and many of them can be quite simple. Most first person shooters have a respawn timer in them, or force you to wait until the next round to play again. This makes a player less likely to throw themselves into a hopeless situation, and should they die, it gives them time to stew over their defeat.

  The real problem, however, is how can you do this without making gameplay frustrating and inaccessable. If a person only gets one 'life', they're going to spend it trying to avoid death constantly. This goes back to what I said earlier; these meaningful outcomes don't have to be negative. Lets say, for example, every time you killed a person, you got just slightly stronger, but when you died, you lost all that benefit. Over time, if you got a real killing spree going, you could reach the point where few people could match you, but one day a group of people are going to hunt you down. Whatever the outcome of that, you're going to remember it, and they will too.

  Now, in reality, if you lost that encounter and died, you're likely to be very annoyed, but you've lost nothing really. You're back to where you started, not behind where you started. For PvP at least, why must the penalty and the benefit be two seperate things?

  Beyond this, you can create meaningful encounters without having any real loss or gain, by tweaking the perception of the players. A duel between two players with no stakes doesn't mean much, but a duel in front of five hundred other players quite definately does, even if there is nothing to gain or lose. Bragging rights, whether it is having your achievement noted publically or by defeating a player under the watchful eyes of your server, matter quite a great deal to many people.

  However it is done, making something meaningful serves to turn something that otherwise would be quite mundane into something a player can truely care about. If there is nothing to lose, why try to avoid losing? Likewise, if there's nothing to gain, why try win?

Tom "Daelus" Pettus